Description :
This paper explores the perverse effects of climate change adaptation policies and financing in the Republic of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Central Pacific. It examines how encounters between financiers and government officials might produce vulnerability to climate change. By discussing several instances where Government of Kiribati elites are required to enact vulnerability in order to secure climate change adaptation financing, it demonstrates that such encounters are performative. It concludes that vulnerability is not a latent condition, but, rather, an emergent effect of an assemblage of facts, expert actors, and objects.